Gwendolyn Zabicki

Region: Midwest

Website: http://gwendolynzabicki.com/home.html

City / State: Chicago, IL

 After becoming a mother, my relationship to time changed. I am awake more hours than I used to be and am busier than before. Yet, there is also a lot of downtime when I am alone with my thoughts. Those brief, flickering thoughts that come and go between so many other things have become the subject of my new work. Sam Anderson wrote, “A vast majority of our waking hours are filled not with witty jokes or brilliant thoughts or epic feelings but with tiny, private mind-motions—thoughts that are hardly even thoughts at all, that don’t rise to the level of sharing with another human being. That millisecond when—again and again—a rusty pipe looks like an owl, or a newscaster’s voice reminds you of a long-gone uncle, or a daily routine sets off a small chain of involuntary associations. These things are almost nothing, and yet they are who we are.” Painting these thoughts is an attempt to capture a nearly invisible but very large part of being alive.